Fool's War (11 page)

Yerusha jumped like she’d been stung. “What do you know about our fosters?”

“It is one of the Freers’ more…publicized goals.” Al Shei kept her voice level. “I know they’re AIs assigned to, sorry, adopted by, individual Freers who want to have a go at creating an environment which could hold a human soul. I know a departed human soul making a home in an AI environment is considered to be the root cause for the AI breakouts like the ones on Edgeward and Kerensk. I also know there’s some sort of lottery involved in who gets to be a ‘parent.’” I also know you’ve never had a single success with it, which is why you’re still sitting here talking to me and not confined to quarters with the thing in Lipinski’s hands. She let her eyes narrow. “It’s not a very popular program in some circles.” She very deliberately did not look towards Lipinski.

Yerusha’s knuckles were turning as white as her cheeks. “I have a right under my contract to bring aboard any legal piece of software that I choose, as long as I don’t infect the ship’s systems or go over my allotted weight limit.”

Al Shei waved her hand and suppressed an urge to laugh. “Oh, stop bristling, will you? I’m not interested in taking it away from you, or saying you broke contract by bringing it aboard. But I want to know if you were really going to let it loose?”

“Here?” Yerusha snorted. “You joke better than your Fool. I would never expose my foster to a crew of complete paranoids.”

“Good,” said Al Shei. “We don’t have room in the system for it anyway, do we Houston?” She cocked her eye at Lipinski.

“Hardly,” said Lipinski to the floor.

“And because it is a legal program and we’ve all got plenty to keep us busy on shift, there’s not going to be any more ideological shouting matches. Right?” She looked straight at Schyler.

“We’ve already discussed the matter,” he replied.

“Glad to hear it.” Al Shei lifted her hands off the chair back and smoothed down her tunic sleeves. “Because I’d really hate this to be the first run where we docked anybody for violating the courtesy and privacy clauses in their contracts.” She glanced first at Lipinski and then at Yerusha. “Is there anything else?”

Lipinski got up. “I guess not,” he said. “I’m going to see how Rosvelt’s doing on the intercom problem.” He left without another word or look to anybody.

The hatch cycled shut and Yerusha leaned forward.

Al Shei made a slicing gesture across her throat. “Before you say anything, I know Lipinski is a paranoiac. He may also be a bigot. Deal with it. You have to work with everyone else, and they have to work with you. If you can’t get your job done because of behavior problems, you
talk
to Watch. If I catch you shouting names across the bridge again, I may decide to pitch you off of here as soon as we get to The Farther Kingdom. And before you feel too picked on, I may decide to do the same to Lipinski.” Her mouth twitched. “It’s hard being one of a kind. I know Freers consider Muslims barbarians…” Yerusha had the grace to look away at that. “In fact, they consider all us groundhogs barbarians and you’re pretty much not allowed to like any of us.” Rebellion surged across Yerusha’s face but she was bright enough not to say anything. “I understand what it’s like to be set apart by your beliefs. I also understand this gives you a great temptation to lie, and cover up, and hide. I’ve done it, so I know that aboard a small ship that only leads to trouble. Maybe disaster. That I won’t have, just as I won’t have personal prejudices getting in the way of my crew getting our mutual job done. We are all here and we can’t rely on one Fool to keep us from each others’ throats. Do your job, Yerusha, and stow the stack until we get to port, all right? And rest assured that now that we’ve been alerted to the problem, Watch will make sure Lipinski doesn’t interfere with anything that doesn’t interfere with the ship or its cargo.”

“Aye-aye, ‘Dama.” Yerusha got to her feet. She cocked an eye at Schyler. “Can I go?”

Schyler nodded and Yerusha left. As soon as the hatch cycled closed, he folded his arms and looked at Al Shei. She waved a weary hand at him. “Don’t say it, Tom,” she fell into Arabic. “Just don’t.”

He shrugged. “All I was going to say was this time you may finally have found the one who refuses to make it easy on herself.”

“She’s proud, she’s scared, and she’s totally on her own. It’ll make you act funny.” Al Shei stood up. “She is not, however, totally stupid, and I do believe she needs this job. She’ll behave.” She made sure her smile crinkled the corners of her eyes. “Who knows? In time she might even be likeable. It’s happened before.”

“Are you talking about me or you, Mother?”

“Impudence,” she snorted. “Go get some supper. You’re no good to me starved and sleepy.”

He grinned. “The hell I’m not.” He cycled the hatch open.

“And don’t swear,” she said to his back as he strode out the hatch.

“Nice job.” Dobbs stood up in the corner. Now it was Al Shei’s turn to jump. She’d completely forgotten the Fool was even in the room.

Dobbs grinned. “Believe it or not, we get training in unobtrusiveness. I got an A in the course.”

“That much I do believe.” Al Shei smoothed her hijab down. “I hope I can count on you to keep an extra eye on Yerusha and Lipinski. A holy war is not something I need aboard my ship.”

Dobbs snapped to attention and saluted briskly. “Yes, Ma’am!”

Al Shei waved her away. “Aren’t you off-shift too?”

Dobbs relaxed her stance and grinned. “Cooks, owners and Fools. We’re never off-shift.”

“No, I guess we’re not.” Al Shei cycled the hatch open. Dobbs bowed deeply and gestured for her to go first. Al Shei did. The Fool took off in the opposite direction, maybe on her way to her own cabin or to catch up with Yerusha and find out how well she took Al Shei’s lecture.

 
As she remembered the anger flashing between Yerusha and Lipinski’s eyes, Al Shei suddenly felt very glad the Fool was aboard.

Dobbs watched the clean, white side of the unnamed tanker fill the square of her view screen. The tanker would top off
Pasadena
’s fuel and reaction mass and send the ship on to the jump point. The
Pasadena
gave itself a final nudge sideways. Far away, Dobbs heard a faint clang reverberate through the hull as the two ships hooked together.

Dobbs, fastened to her desk chair by her freefall straps, found herself admiring Yerusha. The woman’s skills were certainly not over-billed. Hooking up with a re-fueling tanker could be a rough ride if one or the other of the pilots weren’t spot-on with their calculations. As a result, it was standard operating procedure to have the crew strapped into their seats during re-fueling.

Usually time in her straps made her restless. She had never quite mastered the art of sitting still. This time though, Dobbs was glad of the chance to think.

She had been right, this was going to be an interesting assignment, and not just because Lipinski and Resit were resistant to the idea that they might have to get along with Yerusha. Al Shei’s mood had her engineers tip-toeing around, and on the bridge, Schyler wasn’t doing much more than grunting out orders when necessary. Dobbs had spent the last six hours bouncing between the two departments, but her best efforts were yielding minimal results.

It didn’t take a whole lot of looking to see that there was something more than an intercom malfunction operating in the background. Just a little more looking showed that that something was probably Marcus Tully.

She glanced toward the door and then toward her screen where the view was totally blotted out by the tanker’s side.

Now might be the best time to get some research going, she thought, and then rejected the idea. The refueling would take awhile, but not as long as her researches, and if she was caught out of her straps for some reason, Schyler would give her a good going over. It was one of the strange double-standards for a Fool. Technically, Fools could get away with anything, but they had to be extremely careful not to be caught getting away with anything serious. If they did, their reputation for foolishness would change to one for stupidity, or, worse, untrustworthiness. Neither was something any Fool could afford.

Research would have to be done later though. She needed a full bio on Marcus Tully, and another on Jemina Yerusha. The file downloaded into the ship’s book was next to useless. Like Schyler and Al Shei, Yerusha was holding something back. It might be something totally unrelated to whatever was marring the mood of senior crew, but it was there all the same.

Dobbs chuckled and shook her head ruefully. What’s this ship run on? Hydrogen and boron or secrets and mysteries?

She’d spent a chunk of the previous evening in the galley with the Sundars. Like Fools and Chief Engineers, a ship’s galley crew never really went off shift. Harry Dalziel, the steward, was the one on official active duty. He split his time between the kitchen and the laundry. At the same time, Baldassare poured over films detailing the menus and cross-referencing them with the inventory the ship carried versus the inventory he need to acquire at the next stop. Chandra had brought their AI box in from the sick bay and perched it on the corner of the central counter so she could update the crew health records from the notes she’d made during the day.

 
“Actually, most of Al Shei’s crews are as straightforward as you could want to serve with,” said Baldassare. “She and Schyler don’t have much use for the brooding type who takes to the stars to forget.”

“Or to dodge the greens,” added Chandra. “Recent circumstances notwithstanding.”

 
“Ah, Grandmother Chandra, I see through you.” Dobbs waggled her finger at Chandra. “You’re talking about Yerusha, but are too polite to name names.”

Chandra snorted. “Hardly. Yerusha may be a problem child, but the greens are not a problem for her any more than they are for any other Freer with a loud mouth.”

“Isn’t that redundant?” remarked Baldassare.

“When did you join the Fool’s Guild?” asked Dobbs.

“The day I was born, girl, the day I was born,” he answered amicably.

“What I was saying,” cut in Chandra, “is that everybody is here because they want to be, not because they have to be. It makes all the difference.”

“It does depend on what you mean by ‘have to be,” mused Baldassare. “Al Shei does have a way of finding people who really need her. Tully, Schyler, Lipinski…”

“Lipinski?” Dobbs’s eyebrows shot up of their own accord.

Baldassare nodded. “Lipinski needs a place he can work without interacting with AIs. He was actually an apprentice on a comm-crew when Kerensk went down. It hit him hard, and I don’t think he’s had much help getting over it.”

“Which explains his problems with Yerusha. He can’t think much of a people who think independent AIs are close to gods.” Dobbs sipped her tea. As long as humans had sailed in ships, no one knew more about crew dynamics than the galley crew. It made them a Fool’s natural allies and Dobbs was always careful to cultivate their friendship. She was glad the Sundars were so amenable.

“At bottom, Lipinski is a reasonable man,” said Chandra. “Loud, but reasonable. He’ll work around it, especially if he’s prodded.”

Another faint clang shook Dobbs out of her reverie. On the screen, the tanker fell away against the blackness.

“Intercom to
Pasadena
. Secure from refueling,” came Schyler’s voice through the speaker. “Four hours to jump.”

Dobbs snapped the catches on her straps and folded the chair back into the wall. Part of her training at Guild Hall had been how to live optimally in confined spaces. She had draped swaths of green and blue painted faux silk across the walls to help soften the corners. She had mounted her two flexible memory boards on opposite walls from each other. One of which showed a starscape, the other of which showed a sunny day in the green hills of Ireland. She had never been there in the flesh, but she liked to look at it. On the wall next to the desk hung a full length, faux-glass mirror. Like Al Shei, she had piles of pillows in the corners of her cabin, fastened down with velcro to keep them from floating around during free-fall. The overall effect was an airy, comfortable one and Dobbs was quite pleased with what she’d been able to accomplish with her thirty-five pounds.

“So, prod I shall.” Dobbs struck a pose in front of her mirror. “Until the very rivets of the
Pasadena
ring with the mighty shouts of accord between Jemina Yerusha and Rurik Lipinski!” She shook her fist toward the ceiling, took a good look at her reflection and laughed.

Maybe I should put in a call to the Guild, though
, she thought, turning away from the mirror and smoothing her tunic down. Not due to report in for another week, but maybe I should get an advisor on for this run. She opened her night-drawer and put her juggling scarves inside. She took out a flattened spray of paper flowers and tucked them into her right-hand pocket. Four shiny gold coins went into her other pocket. It was important to rotate her props on a regular basis to preserve the element of surprise. She decided against the knotted chain of colored handkerchiefs that she carried up her left sleeve. That particular display did not seem to go over well with this crew.

 
She hooked her finger around her necklace and contemplated the flat, black box in the bottom of the drawer that held her private communications equipment.

In the back of her mind, she heard Amelia Verence chiding her. “Dobbs, you have got to learn the balancing act,” said her tutor and sponsor, “the Guild is a safety net, an information resource, and a back-up, but they can’t do your job for you. Master of Craft means you’ve mastered working on your own.”

“You’re right,” she said aloud to the memory. “I just wish I knew what about this run is making me feel so…young.” She shoved the drawer back into the wall. “Enough stalling, Dobbs,” she told herself. “Time to go to work.”

Lipinski first, she thought as she breezed out into the corridor with her professionally cheerful expression fixed on her face. Yerusha she could tackle later, after they’d made the jump past light-speed.

Dobbs took the stairs down to the comm center.
Pasadena
was a clean ship, but the inside of the comm center gleamed. All transmissions were captured using the center’s main boards outside. Then, they were screened to verify that they contained only what they were contracted to contain and nothing else. After that, they would be transferred into their prepared storage space behind the sealed hatches of the data hold.

The repair benches, transmission boards and duty stations were all to one side. The other side had its own hatches, sealing the main storage facilities away from the rest of the ship. One of the repair benches had its lid closed and the red lock-light was shining, indicating somebody was doing some secure work. Dobbs filed that fact away for later.

Odel, Lipinski’s relief, sat at Station Three, the coordination board. He glanced up with one round black eye as Dobbs stepped through the hatch.

“If you really want to be here,” he whispered, “you are a bigger fool than you look.”

Dobbs snapped her fingers. “That’s what I forgot to do. Work on that dimensional relativity control.”

 
Odel snorted. “Fine, take your own chances when the bodies start flying.”

“Bodies? Linear!” Dobbs rubbed her hands together.

 
Station One, the main transmission station, was a standard board and chair set up. Lipinski sat on the deck next to the chair. One of the repair hatches was open in front of him and he bent so far inside it that his long nose was almost touching the exposed wiring. Above him, Yerusha leaned over the station’s memory boards.

Yerusha glanced up as Dobbs moved past Odel, but Lipinski didn’t. He plucked a pair of tweezers off his belt and reached into the circuits. He pulled a chip out of its socket and replaced it with a fresh one.

“Now?” he asked Yerusha.

Yerusha prodded the board with one finger. “No response.”

Looks like the intercom wasn’t the end of our problems,
Dobbs sighed inwardly.
What is going on?

She thought about the sealed work bench, and then about the infamous and dubious Marcus Tully trying to retrieve something he’d left behind, and a seed of real worry planted itself in her mind.

“So, why aren’t they running a diagnostic?” she whispered out of the corner of her mouth to Odel.

He looked up at her mournfully. “The system ate the diagnostic.”

Dobbs let her eyes go round. “Ate?” she mouthed silently.

Odel nodded.

“If this ship had an AI, we wouldn’t be having this problem,” muttered Yerusha. Odel squirmed visibly. It didn’t take more than that glance to see he wished an emergency would crop up that he could respond to. Dobbs remembered Lipinski’s boast about being hell on apprentice comm crews.

“If this ship had an AI,” Lipinski stuck the original chip back in its socket and shifted his weight to pluck out the next one, “we’d have a whole new set of problems. Now?”

Dobbs lifted up onto tip-toe and with exaggerated steps picked a path to stand behind Lipinski. Yerusha just watched with a resigned air. Dobbs folded her hands behind her back and leaned over the Houston.

“It’d be much the same,” he said to the chip, “as having someone in the hold who doesn’t belong here.” Dobbs’s shadow blocked his light. He rolled his eyes up. “Two someones. Who spend a lot of time poking into things that aren’t their job.”

Dobbs wiggled her fingers to wave hello at him.

“The piloting system is my responsibility,” countered Yerusha. “All of it.”

“And internal communications, which are going straight to hell…” Lipinski set the chip back into its socket and began following a single silver tracing along the dull green surface of the circuit wafer. “Are mine. All of them.”

Dobbs’s mind raced. The boards in the comm center were connected to the bridge because the Houston needed to know exactly where the ship was in relation to the pick-up coordinates when the ship was doing a fly-by data-grab. If he didn’t, he would not be able to activate the capture programs in time to catch the data being transmitted to them. A few dozen kilometers could make the difference between a clean capture and a load of garbled and incomplete data.

With both of them here and on the edge, that link must be off. Completely down, or worse, off by a deceptively small amount.

“Now?” asked Lipinski, reaching between the wafers with the tweezers again.

“Nothing,” reported Yerusha.

“So what in Settled Space is screwing them up like this!” He yanked his head out of the hatch. Dobbs jumped backwards. “Huh? What?” he demanded of Yerusha. “This ship was in order until we got underway. I checked. I know these crashing, burned out, chewed and regurgitated boards like I know my rosary. This should not be happening!”

“Still wishing you could crawl in there?” Dobbs asked cheerfully before Yerusha could respond to the outburst. She peered into the repair hatch at the layers of circuit wafers.

“Can’t fit.” Lipinski rested his weight on his heels and stared at the wafers, brooding. “You might be small enough though.” He tucked his tweezers back into his belt pocket. “You want to pop in there and find out what’s wrong.”